A scoping review of placebo and nocebo responses and effects: insights for clinical trials and practice.

Placebo and nocebo responses and effects influence treatment outcomes across a variety of conditions. The current scoping review aims to synthesise evidence from systematic reviews and meta-analyses in both clinical and healthy populations, elucidating key determinants of placebo and nocebo responses and effects, including individual, clinical, psychological and contextual factors. Among the 306 publications identified, 83% were meta-analyses and 17% systematic reviews, with a predominance of research in medical specialties (81.

[Key Topics and Activities of Local and District Health Conferences between 2013 and 2022: Results of a Non-Reactive Online Screening].

Objectives: The tasks of the Public Health Service include, amongst others, health promotion and disease prevention, health reporting and health planning. In many places, local or district health conferences (HCs) have been established to network and coordinate municipal stakeholders. HCs have been defined in the laws of the German states of Baden-Wurttemberg, Berlin, Hamburg, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia.

EFFects of Exposure and Cognitive behavioral Therapy for chronic BACK pain ("EFFECT-BACK"): study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Introduction: Chronic back pain is a widespread medical condition associated with high socioeconomic costs and increasing prevalence. Despite the advanced implementation of multidisciplinary approaches, providing a satisfactory treatment offer for those affected is often not possible. Exposure therapy (EXP) promises to be an effective and economical form of treatment and in a previous pilot study showed to be superior to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in reducing perceived limitations of movement.

Leveraging Single-Case Experimental Designs to Promote Personalized Psychological Treatment: Step-by-Step Implementation Protocol with Stakeholder Involvement of an Outpatient Clinic for Personalized Psychotherapy.

Our objective is to implement a single-case experimental design (SCED) infrastructure in combination with experience-sampling methods (ESM) into the standard diagnostic procedure of a German outpatient research and training clinic. Building on the idea of routine outcome monitoring, the SCED infrastructure introduces intensive longitudinal data collection, individual effectiveness measures, and the opportunity for systematic manipulation to push personalization efforts further. It aims to empower psychotherapists and patients to evaluate their own treatment (idiographic perspective) and to enable researchers to analyze open questions of personalized psychotherapy (nomothetic perspective).

Ecological and environmental factors affecting the risk of tick-borne encephalitis in Europe, 2017 to 2021.

BackgroundTick-borne encephalitis (TBE) is a disease which can lead to severe neurological symptoms, caused by the TBE virus (TBEV). The natural transmission cycle occurs in foci and involves ticks as vectors and several key hosts that act as reservoirs and amplifiers of the infection spread. Recently, the incidence of TBE in Europe has been rising in both endemic and new regions.

The Puzzle of Evaluating Moral Cognition in Artificial Agents.

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like "intention" which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a "like-for-like" comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science.

Doctors Speak: A Qualitative Study of Physicians' Prescribing of Antidepressants in Functional Bowel Disorders.

Tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) are frequently prescribed for chronic functional pain disorders. Although the mechanism of action targets pain perception, treating patients with TCAs for disorders conceptualized as "functional" can promote stigmatization in these patients because it hints at psychological dimensions of the disorder. The goal of this study was to understand how physicians prescribe TCAs in the face of this challenge.

No open-label placebo effect in insomnia? Lessons learned from an experimental trial.

Background: Open-label placebo (OLP) treatment seems to be effective in several medical conditions but has not yet been investigated in insomnia. Furthermore, it needs to be evaluated whether providing a plausible treatment rationale is essential to obtain OLP effects.

Methods: In two consecutive nights, the sleep of patients with primary insomnia (n = 45) was assessed via subjective and objective measures.

Psychological Predictors of Response to Open-Label Versus Double-Blind Placebo in a Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Objective: There is growing evidence that open-label placebo (OLP) may be an efficacious treatment of chronic and functional conditions. However, patient-level predictors of response to OLP have not been clearly identified. The aim of this study is to evaluate the psychological predictors of response to OLP and to compare this to double-blind placebo (DBP) and no-pill control (NPC).

Patients' experiences treated with open-label placebo versus double-blind placebo: a mixed methods qualitative study.

Background: There is increasing evidence suggesting that open-label placebo (OLP) is an effective treatment for several medical conditions defined by self-report. However, little is known about patients' experiences with OLP, and no studies have directly compared patients' experiences in double-blind placebo (DBP) conditions.

Methods: This study was nested in a large randomized-controlled trial comparing the effects of OLP and DBP treatments in individuals with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Frequency of Adverse Events in the Placebo Arms of COVID-19 Vaccine Trials: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Importance: Adverse events (AEs) after placebo treatment are common in randomized clinical drug trials. Systematic evidence regarding these nocebo responses in vaccine trials is important for COVID-19 vaccination worldwide especially because concern about AEs is reported to be a reason for vaccination hesitancy.

Objective: To compare the frequencies of AEs reported in the placebo groups of COVID-19 vaccine trials with those reported in the vaccine groups.

Norway spruce deploys tissue-specific responses during acclimation to cold.

Climate change in the conifer-dominated boreal forest is expected to lead to warmer but more dynamic winter air temperatures, reducing the depth and duration of snow cover and lowering winter soil temperatures. To gain insight into the mechanisms that have enabled conifers to dominate extreme cold environments, we performed genome-wide RNA-Seq analysis from needles and roots of non-dormant two-year Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H.

Placebo nasal spray protects female participants from experimentally induced sadness and concomitant changes in autonomic arousal.

Background: To investigate the powerful placebo effects in antidepressant drug trials and their mechanisms, recent pioneering experimental studies showed that expectation manipulation combined with an active placebo attenuated induced sadness. In the present study, we aimed at extending these findings by assessing the psychophysiological response in addition to mere self-report.

Methods: One hundred and thirteen healthy female students were randomly assigned to a drug expectation group (active placebo, positive treatment expectation), placebo expectation group (active placebo, no treatment expectation), or a no-treatment group (no placebo, no treatment expectation).

The effect of patient-centered communication on medication intake: an experimental study.

It is not only crucial to provide patients with information, but also to communicate this information in a way to enable patient participation in health decisions. Experimental studies investigating the association between the communication style of health professionals and patients' health decisions are rare, which limits causal conclusions. This study investigated the effect of a doctor's patient-centered communication style on the likelihood to take a medication.

Candidate regulators and target genes of drought stress in needles and roots of Norway spruce.

Drought stress impacts seedling establishment, survival and whole-plant productivity. Molecular responses to drought stress have been most extensively studied in herbaceous species, mostly considering only aboveground tissues. Coniferous tree species dominate boreal forests, which are predicted to be exposed to more frequent and acute drought as a result of ongoing climate change.

Open-Label Placebo Treatment: Outcome Expectations and General Acceptance in the Lay Population.

Background: Most physicians sometimes apply therapies without specific active ingredients. Although patients seem to judge such placebo treatments as acceptable under certain circumstances, deception is still an ethical problem. Open-label placebos (OLPs) might be a promising approach to solve this dilemma.

Expectation-induced placebo effect on acute sadness in women with major depression: An experimental investigation.

Background: Meta-analyses demonstrate that placebo effects play an important role in antidepressant treatment. Expectations seem to constitute a highly relevant placebo mechanism in this context. This study investigated whether an expectation manipulation combined with the intake of an active placebo could reduce acute sadness in depressed participants following a sadness-inducing mood manipulation.

Holistic resource-rational analysis.

We argue that Lieder and Griffiths' method for analyzing rational process models cannot capture an important constraint on resource allocation, which is competition between different processes for shared resources (Klein 2018, Biology and Philosophy33:36). We suggest that holistic interactions between processes on at least three different timescales - episodic, developmental, and evolutionary - must be taken into account by a complete resource-bounded explanation.

Valuation mechanisms in moral cognition.

May cites a body of evidence suggesting that participants take consequences, personal harm, and other factors into consideration when making moral judgments. This evidence is used to support the conclusion that moral cognition relies on rule-based inference. This commentary defends an alternative interpretation of this evidence, namely, that it can be explained in terms of domain general valuation mechanisms.

Discovery of (1S,2R,3R)-2,3-dimethyl-2-phenyl-1-sulfamidocyclopropanecarboxylates: novel and highly selective aggrecanase inhibitors.

Aggrecanases, particularly aggrecanase-1 (ADAMTS-4) and aggrecanase-2 (ADAMTS-5), are believed to be key enzymes involved in the articular cartilage breakdown that leads to osteoarthritis. Thus, aggrecanases are considered to be viable drug targets for the treatment of this debilitating disease. A series of (1S,2R,3R)-2,3-dimethyl-2-phenyl-1-sulfamidocyclopropanecarboxylates was discovered to be potent, highly selective, and orally bioavailable aggrecanase inhibitors.

Synthesis and SAR of 2-phenyl-1-sulfonylaminocyclopropane carboxylates as ADAMTS-5 (Aggrecanase-2) inhibitors.

A series of 1-sulfonylaminocyclopropanecarboxylates was synthesized as ADAMTS-5 (Aggrecanase-2) inhibitors. After an intensive investigation of the central cyclopropane core including its absolute stereochemistry and substituents, we found compound 22 with an Agg-2 IC50=7.4 nM, the most potent ADAMTS-5 inhibitor reported so far.

Novel N-substituted 2-phenyl-1-sulfonylamino-cyclopropane carboxylates as selective ADAMTS-5 (Aggrecanase-2) inhibitors.

A series of N-substituted sulfonylamino-alkanecarboxylate ADAMTS-5 (Aggrecanase-2) inhibitors has been synthesized and the in vitro enzyme SAR is discussed. This report is the first example of carboxylate-based ADAMTS-5 inhibitors which show strong potency of IC(50)<0.1muM with excellent selectivity over MMP-1 and TACE.

Toward a general route to the eunicellin diterpenes: the asymmetric total synthesis of deacetoxyalcyonin acetate.

A novel approach to the hydroisobenzofuran core utilizing a TiCl4-mediated [4+3] annulation is reported. This [4+3] annulation protocol provides a short, general route to the hydroisobenzofuran core present in the eunicellin diterpenes. Using this annulation, a short synthesis (17 steps) of deacetoxyalcyonin acetate, a member of the eunicellin family, has been achieved.